Tag: General

Many API’s out there, such as GitHub’s API, have a concept called “rate limiting” or “throttling” in place. Rate limiting is used to prevent clients from issuing too many requests over a short amount of time to your API. For example, we can limit anonymous API clients to a maximum of 60 requests per hour whereas we can allow more requests to authenticated clients. But how can we implement this?

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website as a discovery document for NuGet feeds. And thanks to a contribution to the spec by Marcin from SymbolSource.org, Package Source Discovery (PSD) now supports configuring Visual Studio for consuming symbols as well. Nifty! Let’s go with an example. If we discover packages from my blog, some feeds will be added to NuGet in Visual Studio. Because my blog links to my feeds on MyGet, I can provide my MyGet credentials with it:

One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform using Git (or TFS or DropBox) and that sources are compiled and deployed on your Windows Azure Web Site. If you’ve checked the management portal earlier, you may have noticed that a number of deployment steps are executed: the deployment process searches for the project file to compile, compiles it, copies the build artifacts to the web root and has your website running. But did you know you can customize this process?

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on which packages containing .NET libraries and tools can be hosted. In fact, support for feeds inspired us to build www.myget.org. While not all people are aware of this, Microsoft started out with two feeds as well: one for www.nuget.org, the other one for the Orchard CMS. More and more feeds are being created daily, both by Microsoft as well as others. Here’s a list of feeds Microsoft has that I know of (there are probably more):

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure Cloud Services in it as well, especially around working with the load balancer. Enjoy the read! With dotTrace Performance, we can profile applications running on our local computer as well as on remote machines. The latter can be very useful when some performance problems only occur on the staging server (or even worse: only in production). And what if that remote server is a Windows Azure Cloud Service?

There is a raging discussion on the interwebs on whether to version API’s by using their URL or by using a custom media type. Some argue that doing it in the URL breaks REST (since a different URL is a different resource while versions don’t necessarily mean a new resource is available). While I still feel good about both approaches, I guess it depends on the domain you are working with.

Just a quick post to let you know I’ll be taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account for the next two weeks. This is the official Twitter account for MSDN BeLux. It’s not hacked, I did not steal the password: they gave it to me! The best thing about this takeover is that there are no constraints: I can tweet whatever I want to tweet! So far it’s been fun to do, I’ve seen a lot of reactions on my tweets as well. Let me know how I do! Who knows, I might just change the password and keep this account for myself after these two weeks :-)

Disclaimer: My job at JetBrains holds a lot of “exploration of tools”. From time to time I discover things I personally find really cool and blog about those on the JetBrains blogs. If it relates to Windows Azure, I typically cross-post on my personal blog. PhpStorm provides us the possibility to connect to Windows Azure SQL Database right from within the IDE. In this post, we’ll explore several options that are available for working with Windows Azure SQL Database (or database systems like SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle, for that matter):

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of maybe having 10 or 15 locations world wide. We were wrong. Here’s what happened: In short: we now have over 50 locations available where a bootcamp will be organized! This one day deep dive class will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. It’s free, so find your location and join the fun!

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js applications, a list of dependencies is restored. For PHP applications, files are copied from source control to the actual web root which is served publicly. Wouldn’t it be cool if Windows Azure Web Sites refused to deploy fresh source code whenever unit tests fail? In this post, I’ll show you how.